Christopher Leonard | |
---|---|
![]() Leonard in 2019 | |
Born |
Kansas City,
Missouri, U.S. |
Alma mater | University of Missouri ( B.A.) |
Occupation(s) | Journalist, author |
Notable work |
The Meat Racket (2014) Kochland (2019) |
Website |
www |
Christopher Leonard (born c. 1975) is an American investigative journalist. He has written three books, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, [1] the New York Times best-selling Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, [2] and The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. [3]
Leonard is a native of Kansas City, Missouri and a graduate of the University of Missouri Journalism School. [4]
Leonard began his career at the Columbia, Missouri Columbia Daily Tribune before moving to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. [5] He moved to the Associated Press in 2005 where he focused on agri-business issues.
In 2014 Leonard joined the New America Foundation [4] where he finished his first book, The Meat Racket which received positive reviews, [6] and has been praised as tracing "the evolution of the modern American meat industry". [7] While at New America he began work on his second book, Kochland, [4] which was published in 2019 to positive reviews. [8] In 2019, Leonard helped to found the Watchdog Writers Group at the Missouri School of Journalism Reynolds Journalism Institute, where he currently serves as Director. [9]
Leonard was a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation from 2014 to 2017. [4]
In 2017 he was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for Kochland. [10]
In 2019, Kochland was also a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. [11]
Christopher Leonard was a Schmidt Family Foundation Fellow at New America. As a fellow, Leonard published The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, which explores the modern American meat system, and began writing a book about Koch Industries.
[T]he book traces the evolution of the modern American meat industry from its post-Depression origins to the present through the eyes of Tyson Foods' innovators and contract farmers. Readers experience first-hand the exhilaration of a young couple breaking ground on their first chicken farm and suffer the sorrow of that same couple, years later, as their farm is foreclosed. We sit in Neal's Café, a small diner in Springdale, Arkansas, as John and Don Tyson, in their matching khaki coveralls, discuss corporate strategy and contrive the McDonalds McNugget.